The planning of a commercial airline's flight plan is a complex and dynamic process that must consider more than delivering passengers from point A to B. The planning of a commercial flight begins many hours and days before the flight actually departs. The process of planning, replanning, and updating a flight plan has many complexities that must be weighed and balanced, to name a few: the airline business case, environmental (i.e., noise, emission), airspace optimization, weather, aircraft performance, passenger connections, medical emergencies, and alternatives. Each of these complexities are considerations that must be continuously monitored, evaluated, and balanced for a multitude of actors (e.g., pilot, dispatcher, air traffic controllers) in the system. These considerations must be incorporated when the flight plan is planned or replanned. If the flight has already commenced, the flight plan is updated.
The flight plan is often viewed as a lengthy document that indicates an aircraft's planned and alternate flight route and includes information such as departure and arrival points, estimated time enroute, weather, notices to airmen (NOTAMs), and type of flight. The large number of considerations that must be weighed and balanced, in a real-time iterative process, mean that the generation and updating of the flight plan is a complex and labor intensive process.
Additional complexity is introduced when the flight plan must be communicated, coordinated, and collaborated with the multiple system actors. The flight plan must also meet domestic and international requirements. This process is time consuming, prone to errors, and labor intensive.
Standardized training, computers, and systems of computers have helped minimize errors, reduced the time to generate and update a flight plan, and diminished communication, coordination, and collaboration efforts and cost. Nevertheless, the dynamic nature of the flight information that impact a flight plan makes it difficult to fully optimize the generation, exchange, and update of a flight plan in a timely and efficient manner prior to and after departure.
Computers, or a system of computers, introduce its own layer of complexity and associated cost. Each actor in the flight plan development process now becomes a user with the system of computers providing the flight plan. The flight plan and flight information must now be exchanged, coordinated, and acknowledged between all applicable systems, where each system represents its respective user. As an example, air traffic controllers receive and view the flight plan information with current status (i.e., positional information) on a radar scope type of display. In this example, the flight plan information displayed for the controller is from both airborne and ground systems. In yet another example, the pilot views the flight plan and flight information on a different system, e.g., the Flight Management Computer (FMC) or the navigation display (ND). Each system (i.e., radar display or FMC) has its own limitations and method of communicating and processing the flight plan and flight information.
In an effort to further reduce complexities to the user(s) and improve operational efficiency, automated flight management and decision support tools, along with computers, are needed. However, due to the dynamic nature of the flight plan and flight information, the automated tools should also be dynamic. Dynamic Automated Tools (DAT) would facilitate the optimization and dynamic generation and updating of flight plan, flight information, flight efficiency, flight optimization, post flight analysis and flight efficiency advisories. DAT is needed to weigh and balance the multitude of considerations as well as collaborate and exchange the dynamic flight information in an optimized (e.g., timely and cost efficient) manner across multiple systems.